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[06/01/2017]When this happened about 6 months ago, it wasn’t clear that troll army IS *a thing* and that hate speech is actually a state-sponsored grammar with a clear semantic line and obvious bullet points.I had said somewhere on the text below that we needed to “hijack their memes”. well as long as we have text and text input as the gateway to online communication, bots and trolls are going to exist. The “solution” to this issue is going to have to be centered around voice interfaces and visuals which can better evade text-based scripting bots and content scraping.I am still on prototype mode (learning to code, folks:) but the solution is advancing storytelling to highly customizable form, preventing retweeting, eliminating text-based inputs on public forums by substituting it with voice interfaces and visuals.——————————————————————————-[11/24/16: comments disabled, DM me instead.] [11/26/16:This post has snowballed into 5 sections since first posted on 11/14/16.]Part1: This answer started as a harmless comment on Melania Trump’s reasons for staying with Donald. My comment painted Melania as a “cool”, honest person who likes handbags.Part2: “PS”. Strangely, I started getting hate speech and troll comments and began noticing odd and yet consistent syntactic (speech) patterns in these comments. [Syntactic = (the way the sentences were structured) as opposed to semantic (what the sentences & words “said”)].Part3: Learning from Goebbels: connecting the speech patterns I found to what I had read many years before on Hitler and Goebbels’ texts on Propaganda techniques (Part3).Part4: From Hitler to He-Man: how Fascism uses these techniques through cartoon-like magical-hate memes like “Build The Wall” and “Hillary The Crook”Part5: 11/25: How to respond to troll comments without getting annoyed, rationale, 2 different methods, basic algorithm and how to tell a troll comment from a normal comment (scroll to the bottom of the page.)[This will move to a blog somewhere in a few days - I’ll post the link here - but it will take a little while. Please check back here in 3–5 days. Happy Thanksgiving y’all!!!](Part1, original post)I swear to God I read an interview with Melania Trump around the time she married him, on Vogue or something. Or some article about her, a looong time ago. This described an interview with her, some sort of press conference. She was asked, by a man, “if Donald weren’t rich, would you have married him?”Her answer was “If I wasn’t beautiful, would he have married me?” which I never forgot, all these years. It showed that she was perfectly aware of the transactional nature of the relationship - she brought the youth and looks, he brought the money. If she were to get fat, he’d dump her in a second. If he became homeless, she’d be gone in no time.I always remembered this line when reading comments from men about dating, how women are “gold diggers”, or when I’d get messages from much older dudes on dating websites who would have some sort of description about how they liked dating “younger women”.The reality is, in order for these types of relationships to be balanced, the older man needs to have serious money. Most women don’t want to be treated as objects, even the super hot ones. The ones that are ok with that, need the man who can deliver the lifestyle in exchange for arm candy support. I mean I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Donald Trump is not an attractive man, especially if he is 25 years older than her. It’s not controversial to say that she was not chosen for her intellect either. She certainly did not choose him for his humble soul, his empathy or his toned physique.I don’t think there is a problem with that, as long as there is no hypocrisy. When men look for women who are much younger who are *extremely* attractive (i.e. they are not “partners”), they should be aware that they will also be objectified, not for their looks, but for their bank account. When women are treated like objects, and expected to perform like objects, there is always a price. In this case, no one is pretending, there is no hypocrisy.Regardless of his shortcomings, and I did NOT vote for him by the way - at least he isn’t like the clueless older men on dating websites who think much younger women would be interested in them for “who they are” when they are only interested in them for the shallowest reasons.Her comment told me she is perfectly fine with the marriage/business arrangement and cheating, he has more than delivered on his part of the deal - taking care of her. Because this is “business” she was not upset that he “cheated” on her. I don’t think “romance” is the idea here.If marital duties with Donald Trump were the job you do to get Chanel handbags, you’d probably be GLAD to hear he is “cheating”. The hard thing is doing the fake-cry thing that is meant to say you’re really “upset” about it.PS: My recollection of having read this interview or article that posited Melania Trump as a cool person had the opposite intended effect. It attracted a number of Trump-supporter “criticism” trolling comments. This criticism came in waves and I have been gathering relevant data on this pattern.My exclusive DELETE algorithm eliminates non-sense, hate speech and those who have just signed up to Quora to spew hatred against my spontaneous personal opinion. I mean it’s not like y’all have anything against the first amendment,right?The data I have gathered about this pattern of trolling so far suggests some kind of central information node that pushes out links for people troll under. All but one or two of the commenters had just signed up to Quora to comment on this.One curious pattern was the presence of links, to wikipedia and other clickbait, which would also suggest that their adtech propaganda machine aka “fake news” is related to tracking analytics, installing cookies, as well sustaining a cpm-generating business arm.Hatebait leaves its territorial “seeds” through these links. None of the people who left comments were able to construct a sentence that made any sense, it quickly descended into juvenilia such as “ do you support trans what about the others” or “it’s so funny that people on quora have to say out loud they did not vote for trump”. Virtually all if the comments used modal verbs “you should/should not” “can /can’t threatening language such as “be careful...”.They read like threats meant to create an atmosphere of fear. Like Hitler did in the 1930s. The best response is ignore and understand their patterns, so that we may learn and turn these memes into jokes. One thing all authoritarian regimes have in common is that they have no sense of humor. It enrages them beyond belief. Laughter is the truth of the child. It can’t be denied, or faked.It is safe to say that if we survive this presidency we have a chance at turning things around. We need relentless humor, and we need to hijack their hatred memes asap.The trolling pattern had entirely external sources, the vitality was generated outside of core Quora user groups. I can’t quite tell if some of these users were 100% coordinated trolls or if a percentage of them were bots, I will update the answer with data visualizations in the next few days. [UPDATE: I contacted Quora to see if I could have access to more specific analytics such as specific times when comments were written or if I could have access to some of the comments I deleted but the answer was, understandably, no. So no data = no data viz:(. As it turns out this was a blessing in disguise, as I will focus on assembling data from sentence patterns instead.](Update: one commenter suggested there might a Trumpalian “50-cent Army”, I had never heard of this term so I looked it up. It is…. “ is the colloquial term for Internet commentators i.e. trolls (Chinese: 网络评论员 wǎngluò pínglùn yuán) hired by Chinese propaganda authorities in an attempt to manipulate public opinion to the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party.”Yup it’s a *thing*. At this point this is a real possibility. Except that we also have capitalism which means that trolling has real business benefits.Their rationale and vocabulary suggests a type of repetitive/ quasi moral preaching devoid of logic, intertwined with trollish sexual innuendo and shock tactics more commonly found in defranchised subgroups. The pattern suggests a propaganda-like concentrated effort to paint Melania Trump as a genius worthy of a nobel prize.The trolling comments did not appear to grasp that my answer was complimentary to Melania. I think she is pretty cool is what I said.Guess what I have my own Jav-a-scriptin’ going y’all gonna have to work a whole lot faster to get with MACHINES-B-LEARNIN’ timezzzz. Data-gatherin’ y’all on my Anaconda-Jupyter child. Concatenatin’ a whole lotta strings. Baby Pandas r comin’.Meanwhile…call 1–800-Peter-Thiel for 140k-a-year jobs. He’s looking to hire at the Stanford of North Dakota campus.11/25: Now that the comments are closed, I can see clearly another interesting pattern that would suggest a coordinated content strategy with a “management” arm behind it.Initially the comments focused on “emotional” punchlines that used classic authoritarian power-play syntax (i.e. imperative voice, modal verb contractions and the use of third person singular, or, “YOU can’t say___ YOU shouldn’t ___ YOU will___, and the utmost, last-resort objectifying statement, “YOU are ____” , which attempts to shift Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum - “I think therefore I am” into objectifying, narcissistic paranoia: “I think therefore YOU are” ). In contrast, normal conversation and civilized commenting consists of the exposition of a specific topic; a back-and-forth and the (hopefully moderate) use of the first-person “I”.I started responding by flat-out copying t heir syntax style, content and memes. Examples: “YOU are a New York Times Liberal Lying Elite Media Liar #lockherup #buildthewall” “DO YOU need a safe space to process your snowflake feelings #hillarythecrook ”] while never showing the engagement and emotional reactions that had amused and encouraged trolls just a few minutes earlier. This actually worked.The issue of the second person is so important in setting the boundaries of subjective space in interpersonal communication that both German and French, for example, use a “polite” second person for all social interactions outside of one’s personal circle of friends and family. Vous (French) and Sie (German) . We all understand that people are self-determining and not defined by whoever grabs the second person microphone first and yells at them.The use of the “informal” tu (French) and du (German) only happens with people you are friends with, or of family. It’s unthinkable and barbaric to use the second person the way it was used on these comments. English does have the embedded informality which masks this well, but the entitled dominance gesture is still glaring.ALL the buttons of “authority” signifiers are pressed. Raging idiotic mobs, reveling in the barbaric attempt to dehumanize your subjective space. Whoever screams the loudest believes they will define *you*. Nah-ahn my friend. I don’t think so!We could get away with the idea that these are bots, but even then, words match what has been said by candidates too well. We can’t “unhear” it.Appendix A: Learning from Goebbels[Note: 11/26: Goebbels has probably been read by people who work in advertising and other persuasion-related fields as well as anyone interested in WWII, power and politics. I am not suggesting that Trump will DO any of the horrible things that Nazis have done, I truly don’t think he will at all.I wrote this to demonstrate the communication and language patterns I found on many of the comments left on my answer from Trump supporters. As I read, and responded to them and watched the patterns of comments appear in clusters, it eerily reminded me of these texts I had read many years ago.I am not a linguist, I don’t know linguistic theoretical terms, but I do speak 6 languages so I could not help but notice this.]Goebbels’ famous words- “A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth”. are key here. Trump’s closest advisor is a quote-unquote white supremacist - I am not *saying this* - I read this in the “liberal media” #lockherup, which as you all know, is “full of lies” #buildthewall - y’all know they dig Hitler and shit.Goebbels was a great guy, an excellent German. He was organized in everything, keeping immaculate records and writing coherent and persuasive sentences while killing millions of people including his own six children:“On the evening of 1 May 1945, Goebbels arranged for an SS dentist, Helmut Kunz, to inject his six children with morphine so that when they were unconscious, an ampule of cyanide could be then crushed in each of their mouths.According to Kunz's later testimony, he gave the children morphine injections but it was Magda Goebbels and SS-Obersturmbannführer Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler's personal doctor, who administered the cyanide.”He and his wife then killed themselves shortly thereafter.This is the guy the president’s closest advisors have obviously read, extensively. And so have I.And this is the guy we have to read up on. Reading Goebbels is key to understanding the skeletons of this dystopian present we are experiencing. He was the architect of hate speech in the Hitlerian regime and he spoke of it very clearly.Understanding the mechanics and goals of hate speech help dispell it. Goebbels’ only gift to us, was his ability to distill his method clearly.“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.” [see #lockherup #buildthewall - the use of catchy visual memes ]“Whoever can conquer the street will one day conquer the state, for every form of power politics and any dictatorship-run state has its roots in the street.”“If you tell the same lie enough times, people will believe it; and the bigger the lie, the better.”[ ok guys seriously: bullying people into believing that Ms. Trump is a genius is crossing the line. It’s straight SNL material right there. Even Goebbels would have been like “smh amateurs!”. He said it very clearly, trying to convert intelligent people does not work.]“There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals…Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.”For an extended treatise on this subject, I recommend reading chapter 6 of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” where he goes on and on about War Propaganda.On this chapter, Hitler describes propaganda’s spread of skillful lies and appeal to the “emotions”:“The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real, the process necessary, the necessity correct, etc. But since propaganda is not and cannot be the necessity in itself, since its function…consists in attracting the attention of the crowd, and not in educating those who are already educated or who are striving after education and knowledge, its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect.”On the need for propaganda to be adjusted for the “limited intelligence” of its audience:“All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be.”There is no need to fear, reading it does not make you a Nazi. But in order to understand this behavior clearly it’s best to get to the source and study it as if you were a detached scientist observing the behavior of bacteria.Not all people who post troll comments are self-conscious hate-mongers. But I would argue that Nazi speech IS the source of our contemporary trolling speech patterns, consciously or not. Therefore the “antidote” for hate speech must come from an in-depth understanding of the ideas, methods and speech patterns found at the source.The strange and gripping paradox in the success of hate speech, is that throughout history, the so-called leaders have openly despised their followers. Hitler and Goebbels have WRITTEN it themselves, calling them dumb and primitive and yet, the spell of hatred as the end-all-be-all solution, remains unabated.Magical-hate memes: The simple genius of FascismThe simple genius of fascism goes undetected by the educated “elites” because it is purposely designed to evade the intellect. It functions by activating a magical-hate-meme that in the blink of an eye, will make all your problems disappear.I am old enough to remember He-Man (a cartoon superhero with a Tyler Swift haircut). Skeletor is the BAD GUY. I mean He-Man’s and She-Ra’s life would be AMAZING if Skeletor were not around. Skeletor wants to destroy the world!!! HE-MAN!!! GET SKELETOR NOW!!!! Whose side are you on? Are you gonna side with Skeletor? WHAT KIND OF PERSON ARE YOU??!!! JESUS CHRIST YOU ARE INSANE CAN’T YOU SEE THAT SKELETOR WANTS TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!!ARE YOU TRYING TO DESTROY HUMANITY? ARE YOU BLIND!!! SKELETOR IS GONNA GET SHE-RA ANY MINUTE NOW!!!It’s pretty simple. #1 define evil #2 go get it!!!! How? Root for HE MAN!!!!! HE MAN is the only one who can fight evil and win in the end!!! HE MAN HAS A MAGIC SWORD!!!The follower’s fantasy, what he truly lives for, is for the eradication of the “evil” as presented by the Leader. The removal of the external-evil-target. THAT is exactly what the Leader presents. The removal of the pain point. THAT is why he is so powerful. So the memes presented by the leader are always related to the fulfillment of this eradication fantasy. Build The Wall, Hillary The Crook In Jail. The Liberal Media Lying about Lies. The Elites. Obama The Foreigner. The New York Times. If you only DARE get between the Leader and the meme YOU ARE JUST AS BAD AS SKELETOR HIMSELF!!! It really does not matter if the Leader is a member of the ACTUAL “Elite”. Because reason, logic, or basic math are not at play here. It’s all about having the *magical ability* to point to external- evil-targets that are “scary” and memes that are all-powerful and insta-pain-removers. How is anyone expected to believe you if you don’t have a magic sword??? GTFO!!!! Bad skin? Didn’t get a raise this year? Got ghosted on Tinder? Ran out of toilet paper? BUILD-A-WALL!!!!!IT ONLY COSTS 10 BILLION TO BUILD A WALL BEFORE STAFFING COSTS, MAINTENANCE AND INFRASTRUCTURE AND WE’RE A REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENT THAT IS GONNA “CUT COSTS”. WHO YOU GONNA CALL?GHOST BUSTERS!!!The genius of this approach is making a tenuous connection appear solid, tangible and real. I am not disputing the problems that are real in peoples lives, such as the real opportunity gap, the lack of benefits and jobs that pay a lot lower than they once did. What I am saying is, the exploitation and “emotional connection” with the population happens outside of the problem-solution realm. It is achieved by exploiting magical thinking and presenting cartoon-like insta-solutions to the evil which is always entirely visible and right there in front of your face. How convenient! All you have to do it point to it.HOW TO ACTUALLY RESPOND TO TROLL COMMENTSTrolls are like happy mosquitos carrying the Zika virus.So the basic recipe really is holding up a mirror: using their own words so that you never have do say anything or even think. Copy and paste.Goebbels described followers as “tools” that carry ready-made messages concocted by “Leadership”. He believed that the “crowd” was not capable of generating ideas of their own, they only served to propagate the powerful magical hate memes spoken by the Leader. They are a little bit like mosquitos carrying the Zika virus. The mosquito is not connected to how the actual disease is generated. But without the mosquito you would not contract the disease.Reacting to troll comments is like taking mosquito bites personallyIf you think of troll comments as mechanical responses injected by hate tools you realize that having an emotional reaction to a troll message is a little bit like taking a mosquito bite personally. You aware it’s nature and you go on with your day. You don’t say “What have I done to deserve this???!!”. You don’t try to have a dialogue with mosquitos. You don’t spend energy engaging. They are desperate hungry mosquitos and you are a decent burger. There is no vegetarian option.Insects don’t feel. To mosquitos, your blood is their life. It’s not about “you”. Likewise, to trolls, your emotion is the only confirmation of success. You are not a person, but a response.If they were mosquitos you’d use OFF but since OFF does not work on trolls, it’s best to try and invent a solution yourself.Hate is a boolean operationWhat I have come to realize is that troll a speech is a boolean operation that seeks a “false” return. We give them this “false” when you say “WHAT are you talking about?, or react in an emotional, indignant manner. You are saying “I am NOT what you just said I am”. When you communicate emotion, their internal hate-filled javascript code returns a little window that says “success”.Yes, you CAN deny them that little pop up window of happiness.The solution is offering a “true” Boolean response.The only way to win over this is working to send a “true” response, where you present NO reaction and only confirm exactly what the troll message itself said. Because hate itself is a boolean operation that is written to achieve the false response ( you say “this is not true”). Hate is about defining “difference” at every turn. The essence of hate is, “That which is unlike me must be denied.” So by giving them a true response their system crashes.Hitler himself said, they can only handle up to 2 simple concepts at a time. They start wondering if the Magical Hate Memes the Leader showed them are really all that powerful since they are not getting a response. The pop up success window did not pop up this time. They’ll never blame you for it, though. They’ll automatically assume it’s an evil character the Leader has mentioned before. Most likely it’s…THE NEW YORK TIMES!!!! LYING THEIR LIBERAL ELITE LIES!!!!Solution 1: The Mindless Method (copy and paste)So if someone says “YOU are a nasty Liberal Elite TRANS snowflake”, you respond either by copying and pasting “YOU are a nasty Liberal Elite TRANS snowflake”. That is all. They will most likely respond with “YOU CAN’T eveyin sayin nothing back. Do your need a collective bathroom to cry?” #buildthewall (no it does not make sense but I think you know that by now). Your response, using the Mindless Method is, again, copy and paste.Solution 2: The Evil Characters and Insta-Memes database combinations[FYI: I don’t know A LOT of computer science and started teaching myself in september (2–3 months ago), so it’s possible that I may have misunderstood terms; The next step is creating a program where people can generate troll comment responses for self-defense purposes. There are still about 8 specific patterns to decode so this will take a little bit]You can also choose from the database of evil characters and insta-memes (this makes me laugh so I go for this one. I am doing a UML chart for this database but you know the contents. Obama The Kenyan, Hillary The Crook, The Liberal Media Spreading Lies. Illegals, Mexicans, Muslims, Asian, etc…each performing the predicted stereotypical operation that makes them evil. Example responses below.Basic structure:authoritarianSyntax + evilClass + evilClassOperation + magicalHateMemeThe core of it really is the combination of the evilClass (Gay, Trans, Muslim, Mexican, Women, Disabled, etc…) and the evilClassOperation (i.e what they do that *proves* they are evil).Examples below.Illegals Stealin UR job.Mexecans rapey people and Eat babys.Muslim are all terorists from syrian counitres includen isreeal and franch.YOU ARE Asiaen i wanrt yr JOB Elite Liberal GO HOME.The important part is having the basic structure down. You can repeat operations for different classes and add elements which I have not covered but I will come back here to later with my UML chart and so forth.You can say “YOU ARE homo YOU are a baby-eating Hillary The Crook chierld” (I am laughing as I type this:). One trick is to let your fingers “dance” in order to misspell words on purpose. It’s almost like a surrealist form of writing. Please leave it as is. They don’t get annoyed at misspelled words. “The Liberal Media That Lies” affects them more deeply. You can misspell words but the structure must be followed.OF COURSE you must not forget the special sauce: the now classic Magical hate-memes. Magical hate-memes must have hashtags at all times and should not be misspelled: #Lockherup. #buildthewall #liberalmediathatlies .The basic structure for the response is something like var authSyntaxSubj = "YOU"; var evilClass = "Mexecans"; var evilClassOperationA = "rapey"; var evilClassOperationB = "people"; var magicalHateMeme = "#BuildTheWall"; var result = authSyntaxSubj +" "+ evilClass +" "+ evilclassOperation "+ magicalHateMeme; document.write(result);what we get is:YOU Mexecans rapey people #BuildTheWallPlease forgive my bad code it may not even be actual code, I am learning, I don’t want to create a misspelling algorithm right now, you know how to do this manually. The code is not “for production” it’s just to show you how predictable “hate” it is.How to tell a troll comment from a normal commentHow can you tell what is a troll comment? Other than misspelled words which are present in probably 93% of the ones I encountered, The use of the authoritarian power play syntax (You+can’t/shouldn’t/are___), the imperative (Do this! Delete this! Remove this! or the use of “you” anywhere in the sentence and of course any mention of the cast of evil characters (Hillary The Crook, The Liberal Media That Lies) and magical hate memes (“Build The Wall”, “Lock Her Up”)One time before I created this method I attempted to respond to someone that kept saying that Melania was “a very successful businesswoman before she met Donald, she speaks 5 languages and she did not need to marry rich” with an actual argument. He then showed his true colors. I wrote back something like “DANANNLLD GEVEH ME CHANELLL HENDBEEGH. DANANNLLD PEENES SMALL MONEEY BIIIGGH” and he had the gall do say “hmm it looks like you had a problem with your keyboard”. I could hear the sociopath’s delight. I thought I was clever, but the reality is that he won. I had taken the bait. I used braincells. I assumed this was a conversation, I wanted to be clever.So whenever you read anything that appears to be a sentence, remember it’s a trap. Trolls don’t think for themselves. They don’t care about “you”. They just want your emotional reaction. Let me say this again: they just want your emotional reaction. Goebbels said it himself, avoid the intellect, go for the emotional reaction. Logic or reason will never work with hate. You must only speak their limited language of primitive stereotypes and magical thinking and structure it within the basic troll algorithm.After this comment I then learnt to block on Quora and subsequently created this “method”.][About me: I speak 6 (human) languages and 3 months ago started learning Javascript and other programming languages and paradigms on my own, both of which inform this comment. I have never worked in “intelligence” or government and I don’t have formal knowledge of the field of linguistics; my understanding of structure came as a result of learning languages. I just happened to connect a pattern of separate and seemingly related dots once my Quora answer started receiving trolling comments.I went to art school and my understanding of German and German culture comes from an interest in theories of the history of art and a short-lived part-time job in graduate school as a provenance research assistant for works of art acquired during the Nazi era. ]